This article appears in the April 29, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Sare for U.S. Senate: Petitioning Across New York State for World Impact
[Print version of this article]
April 21—As the Battle of Lexington and Concord kicked off the American War of Independence on April 19, 1775, the drive to place LaRouche Independent candidate for U.S. Senate Diane Sare’s name on the New York ballot for the Nov. 8 midterm election officially kicked off this April 19, in a unique effort, with volunteers from all over the nation joining in to aid in the gathering of voters’ signatures.
Amidst the increasingly dangerous drive for thermonuclear war with Russia and China, and the unprecedented famine now threatening over one billion people around the world as a result of unilateral sanctions by the West, Sare has underscored that the campaign will be crucial to organizing millions of people in the United States and internationally to demand an alternative to the enforced austerity, poverty, and hyperinflation created by Wall Street and the City of London. Informed observers have noted that putting Sare on the ballot will be an internationally important alternative to incumbent Chuck Schumer (D), who has served these Wall Street/London policies in the U.S. Senate since 1999.
The Sare campaign is required to gather a minimum of 45,000 valid signatures of registered New York voters over a six-week period. This onerous requirement comes from a section quietly inserted into the 2020-2021 New York State Budget, which tripled the requirements from 15,000 to 45,000 signatures for statewide independent candidates to get on the ballot, and also without fanfare eliminated third parties, including the Libertarian Party, Green Party, and Serve America Movement (SAM) Party, which had achieved party status earlier.
The alleged reason for doing this was stated in a report submitted by the Campaign Finance Reform Commission to then Gov. Andrew Cuomo, State Sen. John Flanagan, Assemblyman Carl Heastie, Assemblyman Brian Kolb, and State Senator Andrea-Stewart Cousins, which sought to “craft a public campaign finance system that remains within the enabling statute’s limitation of a $100 million annual cost … ensure that funds are not dedicated to frivolous or uncompetitive campaigns … and that political parties whose candidates will draw down on public funds … reflect the novel and distinct ideological identities of the electorate of New Yorkers who ultimately fund this public campaign finance program.”
Put more bluntly, New York state has effectively ruled that any candidate, or party, presenting an alternative to the corrupt political parties and the financial forces that control them, will not be allowed to have his or her voice heard by the voters of the nation. It is now seemingly impossible for any independent voice to get on the ballot in New York, with the institution of absurd, onerous requirements resembling those of the Jim Crow laws used to enforce racial segregation in Mississippi and other Southern States from the 1870s until the Voting Rights Act was finally implemented in 1965.
Another barrier to free and fair elections is the absurd gerrymandering by the Democrat-controlled legislature in New York to remove certain congressional seats controlled by the Republican Party. A state Supreme Court judge, Patrick McAllister, had ruled in favor of a lawsuit filed by Republicans, striking down the Democrats’ redistricting as unconstitutional. Subsequently, however, an appellate judge enforced a stay on the lower court’s decision, which for this election effectively overturns the previous ruling that the redistricting maps are unconstitutional.
New York’s ‘Freedom Spring’
Despite these barriers, Diane Sare and her campaign have said that they are absolutely committed to collecting the signatures required to get on the ballot, and will deploy with the intent of restoring representative government in the state and the nation as a whole. It is interesting to see that many people, inspired by Sare’s challenge, have begun to get involved in politics and petitioning, reporting their agreement that the nation is, in their opinion, facing existential circumstances. Sare has named her campaign “New York’s Freedom Spring” after the valiant, heroic actions of African-Americans in the famous “Freedom Summer” of 1964 to obtain the right to vote in Mississippi.
Over the course of the next six weeks, the campaign has reported that they intend to recruit more and more petitioners to supplement the forces now mobilized, along with more workers to clerk the signatures. Along with the 45,000 valid signatures which need to be collected, the new law stipulates that at least 500 signatures must be secured from each of half of the state’s 26 congressional districts.
What the Sare campaign has emphasized is at stake—including in the petitioning drive itself—is restoring the representative quality of leadership in the United States, and fostering a new, international paradigm of relations among nations, calling attention to Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s April 9 international conference, “To Establish a New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations.” There is in this effort, a strong belief in the possibility of a creative breakthrough, in not merely putting this independent candidate on the ballot, but in creating a new movement of leaders who will break with the current administration’s drive towards war in the spirit of Lyndon LaRouche’s activism and commitment to reversing the backwardness imposed by geopolitics, and instead, improving the standards of life, education, and happiness for every human being on the globe.
